Offshore IT Vendor Due Diligence Guide

The document we wish buyers used on us

Most enterprises sign an offshore IT master services agreement after two sales calls and a vendor-supplied deck. The deck is excellent. It was built by people whose job is building decks. It tells you almost nothing about who will actually be assigned to your account.

We are an offshore firm. This guide is written from the supplier side of the table, which is precisely what makes it useful — it names the questions that are uncomfortable to answer, because we know which ones those are.

Named people, not named capabilities

The twenty vendor-call questions are built around one distinction: capability at the firm level versus capability on your account. A vendor can truthfully claim deep Salesforce expertise while assigning you a team that has none of it, because the expertise sits elsewhere in the business.

The questions push toward specifics — who exactly, with what history, for how long, and what happens when they leave. Vague answers to these are themselves the finding.

Contract language does the enforcing

Ten clauses to demand before signing, because verbal assurances during a sales cycle have no force once delivery starts. These cover team continuity, handover obligations, IP ownership, and what actually happens when SLAs are missed — which in most standard MSAs is nothing.

SLA benchmarks are included so you are negotiating against a reference point rather than accepting whatever the vendor’s template proposes.

Ten reasons to stop

The walk-away signals are the section most buyers skip and most need. Each one is a pattern that reliably predicts a failed engagement — not a red flag to note and proceed past, but a reason to end the process.

The guide is sequenced to be used in order: pre-call vetting, the call itself, reference checks with their named clients, technical deliverable assessment, SOW review, then a first-thirty-days checklist for after kick-off, when problems are still cheap to fix.