2nd Annual Red Hat Challenge 2012 to open to regional students in APAC

This year’s theme “For the students, by the students” an extension of collaborative ideas of the Open Source community

Kuala Lumpur – 15 October 2012 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the second regional Red Hat Challenge, a knowledge-based technology competition aimed at students from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan.   The competition begins on 2 November 2012 and the top two finalists from each country will travel to Beijing to take part in the final round on 15 December 2012.

In keeping with this year’s theme of “For the students, by the students”, the platform that will be used to test that participating students’ knowledge is built by a Singaporean engineering student. Lim Guo Wei, from Singapore Polytechnic, designed and coded the application on OpenShift, Red Hat’s free, auto-scaling Platform as a Service (PaaS) for applications. The theme was chosen to represent the empowerment of students through Open Source.

The competition will be open to all full-time students from any university, polytechnic or private school in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. Each contestant will be tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux system administration, network administration, security administration and virtualization tasks.

“Following the positive response from our inaugural Red Hat Challenge last year, we’ve decided to scale up and open the contest to more students from the region” said Sachin Shridhar, Senior Director, Services, Red Hat Asia Pacific. “This year’s theme of ‘For the students, by the students’ is an extension of collaborative
innovation. We believe that this framework, which is built on sharing ideas and driving innovation amongst users, goes beyond developers, IT professionals and enterprises. We want to show that students also play an important role in open source communities.”

The importance of nurturing the next generation of IT professionals is driven by the growing demand for IT professionals, particularly those who possess the skills to work in Open Source environments. According to a recently released 2012 Linux Jobs Report by the Linux foundation, 81 per cent companies have indicated that hiring Linux talent is a priority in 2012. In Asia, this percentage is even higher, with 86 per cent of companies indicating that hiring Linux talent is a top priority.

“We are confident that the Asia Pacific region will continue seeing an increasing demand for individuals who have the relevant IT skills to help companies transition and leverage on new and emerging technologies,” added Shridhar. “This competition is part of our commitment to help grow and shape the next generation of IT professionals in the region.”

The regional Red Hat Challenge includes three stages:
Stage 1 (2 November 2012) – Conducted online, this speed round would require each student to answer up to 118 multiple choice questions, on over 20 topics, in 60 minutes. The top 20 students from each country will be selected to move to the second stage.

Stage 2 (Starting 12 November 2012) – Each of the top 20 students in each country will visit the Red Hat office nearest to his or her residence for an in-person interview with a Red Hat Certified Instructor. Each student must resolve three different problem scenarios presented by the Red Hat Certified Instructor. The results will be scored, and the top two students from each country will move on to the final round of competition.

Stage 3 (15 December 2012) – The top two students from each country will travel to Beijing to compete with one another in an open book competition on virtualization.

Visit the following website: www.apac.redhat.com/redhatchallenge2012