You already had good and wise answers but if you need to surprise or just want to learn more, Perl can handle this situation in few keystroke (see perlrun for details); given the following inputtable.txt file:

Client|Counts by Month
IBM | February 1 March 5 July 4
Oracle| January 3 March 4 April 6 May 5
RedHat | March 2 June 3 August 1
[download]

you can tame it at your will with:

# warning windows double quotes!
perl -MData::Dump -F"\s*\|\s*|\s" -lane "next if $.==1;$r{$F[0]}={@F[1
+..$#F]};END{dd %r}" inputtable.txt

(
  "IBM",
  { February => 1, July => 4, March => 5 },
  "Oracle",
  { April => 6, January => 3, March => 4, May => 5 },
  "RedHat",
  { August => 1, June => 3, March => 2 },
)
[download]

or if you prefere the core module Data::Dumper you'll end with a longer version:

perl -MData::Dumper -F"\s*\|\s*|\s" -lane "next if $.==1;$r{$F[0]}={@F
+[1..$#F]};END{print Dumper \%r}" i
nputtable.txt
$VAR1 = {
          'IBM' => {
                     'February' => '1',
                     'July' => '4',
                     'March' => '5'
                   },
          'Oracle' => {
                        'March' => '4',
                        'May' => '5',
                        'January' => '3',
                        'April' => '6'
                      },
          'RedHat' => {
                        'June' => '3',
                        'March' => '2',
                        'August' => '1'
                      }
        };
[download]

L*