LONDON, UK: Dell Inc, the world's second-biggest maker of personal computers, launched a service on Tuesday designed to help law-enforcement agencies convict more criminals as digital evidence proliferates.

The company said its digital-forensics offering would help police reduce backlogs that can be as long as two years, as it would allow multiple analysts to work simultaneously on the same data, while preserving an audit trail of evidence-handling.

"Law enforcement agencies across the world have told us about the enormous challenges they face in analyzing huge volumes of data on seized digital devices," Josh Claman, head of Dell's European public-sector business, said in a statement.

James Quarles, Dell's head of public-sector marketing in Europe, told Reuters customers remotely accessing criminal evidence in parallel from Dell datacentres could gain a crucial time advantage, for example when legally constrained as to how long they could hold terrorism suspects without evidence.

Dell made about $15 billion in sales to the public sector last year, including hospitals, government, education and defence -- about a quarter of its total revenue.

The company cited estimates by research firm IDC that the U.S. digital-forensics market would be worth $630 million this year, up from $252 million in 2004, while the international market would be worth $1.8 billion by 2011.

Partners in Dell's offering include data-storage gear maker EMC Corp, chipmaker Intel Corp, business-software maker Oracle Corp, security-software maker Symantec Corp and privately held digital-forensics specialist AccessData.

Dell will present the new service to Britain's Association of Chief Police Officers on Tuesday.