Embedded is difficult at times

I work in the IT department of an FMCG company in the Asia/ Pacific region. We also have operations in Europe. We had used RFID for tracking some of our shipments with select retailers, and had jumpstarted it with different devices in Asia and Europe, both having embedded middleware (I can't take the names of the vendors). They worked well in the POC stages but later we realized that we were facing problems with scalability because our IT department was having difficulties maintaining multiple versions, and we also needed customizations to be done based on a few firewall constraints that we had in some areas. One of the vendors (in Asia) had agreed to doing the customizations whereas the other vendors refused, stating it as infeasible. We realized that the maintenance cost for the embedded middleware was also going higher than expected. Finally we used a server based middleware and we hired an IT services provider to do the customization for us, and it was easier for us to manage. This is just personal experience that I thought I would share, because I'm aware of some of the challenges with embedded middleware.