Benchmark for Authentication Services

[Steve Tylock <stylock@questra.com>]

I've been asked to come up with some benchmark numbers for a client
that is considering an "authentication service".  The specifics
include feeds from several databases of groups of individuals into a
consolidated "people" database and use of an LDAP product to
authenticate multiple web sites (and eventually other services / 
applications).

What I am looking for is some estimate of cost on a per user (or other
reasonable) basis.  That is - Organization X (either internal to
the parent, or outsourced to a 3rd party) runs the servers, takes
care of high availability, disaster planning, maintenance, service
responsiveness, etc, and charges $2.50 (for example) per user entry
per month.  This is not a cost to run a web (or other) server, just
a service to take username / password requests to verify identity,
and offer people data to other systems (ie - stuff LDAP does for you).

The lack of information about this comes in 3 main areas:

* not many places have completed this type of project on a large scale
* If they have, they are not releasing the costs
* If they have, the costs are included in a larger charge / allocation
  that includes things like system maintenance.

I will release a summary of all the individual responses I get back.

Info to send:

Type of organization: (govt, edu, bank, manufacture, non-profit, etc...)
Size of database: (10, 100, 1k, 5k, 10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, (bigger?-))
Costs: (per user, per whatever)
Cost basis: (at-cost, cost+profit, ?)
How long has it been running:
Type of authentication service:
Other interesting info:

If you had a rolled up figure, and would hazard a guess as to the
portion of it that is authentication, I'd be happy to hear that
as well.  (It certainly would be more than what I have now;-)

thanks
steve
tylock@questra.com