Dell to assist plod with inquiries

DELL, THE COMPANY known to the police of New Orleans, is offering a digital Sherlock Homes package in Blighty to help Inspector Knacker of the Yard solve computer crimes.

Dell claims that its digital forensics package will help the beleaguered Britsh plod work simultaneously on the same data while preserving an audit trail of evidence handling.

The package, which was designed with Dell's Intel chums, will supposedly give coppers tools to build and host their own datacentre, meaning they can have all the convenience of so-called cloud computing while keeping control of it themselves.

James Quarles, Dell's head of public sector marketing in Europe, told Reuters that customers remotely accessing criminal evidence in parallel from such datacenters could gain a crucial time advantage.

It is designed to do things quickly, as coppers may be legally constrained as to how long they can hold suspects without evidence.

It is not surprising that Dell should think a lot about public sector needs. It made about $15 billion in sales to the public sector last year, including hospitals, government, education and defence. That was about a quarter of its total revenue.

The US digital forensics market could be worth $630 million this year, up from $252 million in 2004, while the international market would be worth $1.8 billion by 2011, according to beancounters at IDC.

Dell is showing off its digital forensics package to Britain's Association of Top Cops today. µ