Staff in Red Hat's Beijing office plan to work closely with other vendors in the region, including IBM, HP, Intel, Dell and Oracle.

Establishing local support for the company's university training programme on open source development and Linux usage is one of Red Hat Beijing's first initiatives. The company says it is working with Tsinghua University and Nanjing University.

A company spokeswoman declines to say how many employees Red Hat has in China. Beijing marks the 28th worldwide office opened by the Raleigh, North Carolina, based open source software maker.

Red Hat's other facilities in the Asia-Pacific region include offices in Singapore, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia.