More than a dozen employees at Scale Computing won’t have to fumble with a comb Friday.

Or for several days, for that matter.

They had their heads shaved at work Thursday in honor of Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano, who lost his hair during treatment for leukemia. His cancer is in remission.

Colts players shaved their heads in honor of the coach, and somebody at Scale opined that employees should do the same.

“We said, ‘Well, if you guys want to, we can have a barber come into the office and get you all done at once’,” said Jeff Ready, co-founder and CEO of Scale, based at Purdue University’s technology park near Indianapolis International Airport.

At last count, 15 to 20 Scale employees planned to be sheared, including a couple of guys at the Indianapolis company’s offices in San Mateo, Calif.

Scale employs about 60 people. None of the women in the office were planning to take such a drastic measure. Ready doesn’t plan to join in the shearing, joking that he worries it won’t grow back.

His marketing director, Heidi Monroe Kroft, was scheming to have him involuntary sheared.

Ready said the gesture by employees in support of Pagano “is one of the great things about Indianapolis and being here.” 

Ready, a Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology graduate, started the company in California but moved it to Indianapolis a few years ago.
Scale Computing makes data-storage devices. It recently launched a “datacenter in a box” product and landed another $12 million in venture funding.

The funding will be used largely to help accelerate sales of Scale’s “HC3” product. Launched this summer, HC3 is being touted as a groundbreaking alternative to the so-called virtualization of the data center.

The virtualization trend sweeping the industry involves software licensed from firms such as VMware that that allows several operating systems to run as “virtual machines” on a single computer.

Scale had sales last year of about $10 million.