Easiest way to use new tools in old Linux environment

At the day job I need to use the standard Linux install that is on all our machines. Upside: its standard and supported by IT. Downside: it uses pretty old tools. "old" relatively speaking of course!

Compiling new versions of tools would be really tedious because of the web of dependencies that would drag in and reinstalling is not an option.

Can anyone suggest an easy way to use the tools of a more modern Linux distribution like fedora 10/11 or ubuntu 9.04 overlaid on a 2 year old centos environment? Is running a virtualized copy of a modern distribution the only way forward? That would still be a hassle because of having to try to 1) get it working in the environment (who knows if vmware or virtualbox will even run on the standard setup here) and 2) duct tape the various filesystems etc together.