In its heyday the centre employed over 550 engineers and designers, who worked on AXE exchange processor, switching and routing design as well as middleware design and standards development. At the time the closure was announced there were 420 staff working at the centre.
The former managing director of the lab, Ric Clark, says one core group has survived the chop. The standards experts that represented Ericsson in various international forums will be sent off to the Centre for Ultra Broadband Information Networks, a research facility based at the University of Melbourne.
Although the lab may have closed down, all of its design output is still used by Ericsson globally.
"All of our product actually still continues. All of our product lives and we've had to transfer the on-going development and maintenance of that product to other design centres," Clark told ZDNet Austalia .
The products' upkeep has been transferred to research and development centres in Ireland, Croatia, Italy, Sweden and Germany--closer to the company's headquarters.
"With revenues dropping away they had to make quite dramatic cuts in [research and development]," Clark said. "At the end of a day [Ericsson is] a European organisation... in proximity and management reasons it was just a lot easier for them to consolidate back to the centre".
"That's the main reason... the tyranny of distance got us to a large extent," he added.
Although the writing had been on the wall for some time before the closure, no one was expecting the entire lab to be shut down in one fell swoop.
"Obviously people were upset and shocked... a lot of people didn't think--myself included--that a scenario where they just closed us down completely was on the cards. We thought we'd probably go through another round of cuts," Clark said.
However from a morale perspective it was probably the right decision, he said. Death by a thousand cuts would have been a depressing way to see the lab out.
Ericsson has been seeing off the AsiaPacificLab staff at regular intervals for months now. A lunch at the local pub, followed by a "quiet ale" at a local night club, ironically a venue that was popular with Melbourne's IT elite back in the boom days, has been the accepted formula for the farewells.
"The wind down has been pretty gradual. Even as recently as April we had around 200 people on the books," Clark said.
It hasn't been doom and gloom for all of the lab's staff though. Some of them have launched ventures of their own.
"A few of our entrepreneurial managers decided to create some sub-contracting vehicles," Clark said. They created a one-stop-shop for Ericsson or other companies wanting access to ex-AsiaPacificLab staff.
The bulk of the redundant staff are currently on holidays or looking for jobs.
"We don't have good data on who's found jobs... but it's a really tough market out there," Clark said.
But that doesn't mean that research and development in Australia is dead. If anything, it's stronger for having had the lab operate in the country in the first place. It has been an excellent training centre for the staff that have worked there, according to Clark.
"They leave Ericsson very well equipped in terms of the training and the experiences they've had. They truly are world class designers and researchers... whilst things will be tough in the interim, as the market picks up again it's 400 world-class people who will be re-absorbed into the Australian market place and that can only be good for the local industry," he said.
There was quite a large number of recent graduates employed at the lab, which was "a very young organisation", Clark said. He says that's the nature of working with new technologies.
Clark himself will take up a business development post at National ICT Australia.
