Practice 03 / Vendor advisory
An independent read on the proposal in front of you.
We resell nothing, we take no referral fees, and we sit in no vendor’s partner tier. That is the entire value of the service: a second opinion from someone with nothing riding on the answer, delivered before the signature rather than after the first invoice.
Why it pays for itself
A quote answers what you asked. A review answers what you did not.
What the vendor quote tells you
- The list price of what they chose to include
- A scope written in the vendor’s own vocabulary
- Year-one cost, usually with a first-year discount
- The features that differentiate them from rivals
- A timeline built around their delivery capacity
None of which is dishonest. It is simply written by the party being paid.
What an independent review adds
- What was excluded, and what that costs to add later
- The same scope restated in terms your team can verify
- Three-year total cost including escalators and renewals
- Which of those features you will realistically use
- The dependencies on your side that nobody has staffed
- The exit terms, read before they matter
On most mid-market proposals the delta found here exceeds the cost of the review.
What we review
Before the signature, not after the first invoice.
Proposals and quotes
Line by line: what is included, what is conspicuously absent, which assumptions are doing the heavy lifting, and what the second year looks like once the introductory pricing lapses.
Platform selection
A like-for-like comparison built on your requirements rather than on the feature matrix each vendor supplies, with the trade-offs stated plainly instead of scored out of ten.
Contracts and SLAs
Service credits that cost the vendor nothing, data-return clauses, price escalators, auto-renewal windows, and the notice period you will need to have diarised years in advance.
IT spend and licences
What you are paying for, who is using it, how many seats are assigned to people who left, and which subscriptions duplicate something already bundled in a licence you own.
Managed service agreements
What "fully managed" actually covers in the contract as drafted, where the boundary sits when something breaks, and what falls to your team at two in the morning.
Renewal and exit
What it would take to leave: data formats, migration effort, minimum terms and the practical lock-in that never appears as a clause but decides the negotiation anyway.
What you get
Short, specific, and written to be forwarded.
Most clients send our findings straight to the vendor or to their board, so the report is written to survive being read by people who were not in our conversations.
The findings memo
Two to four pages: what the proposal covers, what it omits, where the risk sits, and the questions worth asking before anyone signs anything.
The three-year model
Total cost of ownership across the realistic life of the decision, including the escalators, the growth assumptions and the internal effort that never appears on a quote.
The negotiation brief
The specific points that are genuinely movable, ranked by what they are worth to you, and the ones not worth spending negotiating capital on.
Who you are working with
We have sat on your side of this table for twenty years.
Christopher Moskowitz owned the Microsoft portfolio at a global investment bank, covering strategy, engineering, vendor relationships and contract negotiations, and rebuilt an entire IT function out of a fully outsourced arrangement at a previous firm. Vendor due diligence there ran on BitSight, KY3P and SecurityScorecard rather than on references. The proposal in front of you is a document type already read several hundred times, from the side that had to live with it.
Common questions
How fast can you turn around a proposal review?
A single quote is usually three to five business days. A competitive evaluation across several vendors takes longer because the comparison has to be built on like-for-like assumptions, which the proposals themselves almost never share.
Do you take commission from any vendor?
No. We hold no reseller agreements, no partner-tier status and no referral arrangements. You pay us, and that is the only money in the room, which is the point.
Will you talk to the vendor directly?
If you want us to. Some clients prefer to take the findings into the negotiation themselves; others would rather we ask the awkward technical questions. Both work.
Can you review a contract we have already signed?
Yes, and it is worth doing before the auto-renewal window rather than after it. We look for the clauses that bite at renewal or exit: data return, price escalators, minimum commitments and notice periods.
What if the proposal turns out to be good?
Then you sign it with more confidence than you had, and the review has done its job. We are not paid to find fault, and a short report saying the pricing is fair and the scope is complete is a perfectly normal outcome.
Send us the quote. We will tell you what it does not say.
info@vandien.io · (551) 236-3191 · Ridgewood, NJ, serving the New York metro