Last year, Red Hat Challenge, a knowledge-based technology competition, attracted approximately 1,500 tertiary students from across five countries in Asia Pacific. After two rounds of testing the contestants on their knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux system administration, network administration, security administration and virtualization tasks, two representatives from each country competed with each other in Beijing for the grand finale. Elgin Ng from Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore, bested the competition and was crowned the champion.

This year's theme, "Building the Next Cloud Generation", focuses on the contestants' skills and knowledge in cloud computing, operating systems and virtualization. Since the launch of the competition in September, more than 3,400 students from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan have signed up for the competition.

"The number of participants this year has more than doubled our entries last year, and we are very happy to see more tertiary institutions encouraging their students to participate," said Sachin Shridhar, director, Services, Red Hat Asia Pacific. "Cloud computing continues to grow significantly in Asia Pacific and the rest of the world, and we understand the importance of nurturing our next generation of IT professionals with the needed skills and expertise to meet real-world industry demands, and enabling them to become valuable members for the IT workforce."

The finale of this year's Red Hat Challenge will take place in Beijing in December 2013. Finalists will each receive an internship opportunity with Red Hat as well as a certificate of participation, while the grand prize winner will win a Samsung Galaxy S4 mobile phone, an internship opportunity with Red Hat, winner's trophy and certificate of participation*.

*Red Hat reserves the right to replace prizes with another of the same value.

For more information, visit the Red Hat Challenge 2013 website.