Are you sure the application doesn't output fixed-width data? If it did, then you could use unpack. Otherwise, maybe you can use \d instead of \w if some of your columns always output numbers.

UPDATE: This seems to work. Probably no uglier than a regex: 

use warnings;
use strict;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my @cols = split;
    my @a1 = splice @cols, 0, 3;
    my @a2 = splice @cols, -7, 7;
    my $pool = join ' ', @cols;
    print join(';', @a1, $pool, @a2), "\n";
}

__DATA__
PID  POLS U(%) POOL_NAME    Seq# Num LDEV# H(%) VCAP(%) TYPE PM
003  POLN   0  Bad name with spaces   13453   2 61443  80   -  OPEN N 
002  POLN  52  DemoSolutions   54068  7 61454  80   -  OPEN N

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In reply to Re: Regular Expression - delimiter/spaces problem by toolic
in thread Regular Expression - delimiter/spaces problem by demichi

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