Just clearing up a couple of misstatements on this and the "Deere/DuPont" post below,  and clarifying policy:

• When we host data for a grower, under a direct grower subscription:
  • The data belongs to the grower.
  • The data is comingled with other grower data into a single database.
  • A grower may choose to allow his data to be aggregated with that of other growers within the database, and if they so choose, they will have access to all aggregated data.    This would be for "how did Y99 perform for other growers in eastern Indiana" types of questions.
  • By default, the grower is not opted-in for data aggregation, and they will have no access to aggregated summaries.
  • No other external entities have access to the data aggregation.  ONLY growers that are participating in the community.
  • Upon request, we can provide a dump of all of the grower's data so that they can have a backup or move the data into another system.
• When we host data for a service provider:
  • We treat that data as if it is the provider's.    We do not interfere with any business relationship between the provider and their customer regarding data ownership.
  • The data is hosted in a dedicated database for that provider.    Their data is NEVER comingled with that of any other provider or our individual grower customers.
  • The provider can request a full database backup (not a data dump, but an actual copy of the database) for offsite storage or data migration.
  • The provider has full rights to perform any type of data aggregation within their database that they wish.   We do not interfere with any agreements that they may have with their customers about how this data is used and who has access to it.
• By contract with our customer (grower or provider), we will never, ever provide external access to their data unless the customer requests that we share their data for purposes of third-party integration (for instance, we obviously have to publish boundaries to SatShot to order aerial imagery).
• While partly owned by Pioneer, Pioneer is treated as a "provider" customer, with their data in their own database and hosted on their own server.
• For business and logistical reasons, we have chosen to host the hundreds of databases we manage for our customers on a Pioneer server farm, but it is outside of the Pioneer firewall and Pioneer proper.
• A grower that does not want their data comingled with other grower data can purchase a service provider license and have their own database (and many do).

Relative to people being able to host their own data, we have always documented three challenges that we needed to address before we could support it:

• We originally chose to avoid deploying local databases because we were enhancing the software so fast, it was much more expedient to be able to run update scripts and database maintenance ourselves, rather than having to build tools to be run by customers.   We are basically past that point.
• We believed that a customer needed to be able to access their data via mobile devices when out of the office.   We now have a web-app that is sufficiently stable for a customer to host on their own server and we have our first customer already doing it.
• Our customers become increasingly reliant on automatic third-party integration data transfer.  For instance, integration with SatShot or Geovantage imagery, or Veris processing, or soil test lab processing, and having that data flow directly into their database w/o having to do anything.   Now add in the wireless field operations data transfer options that are becoming available, and that ease of use is even more desirable.  There is a LOT of backend server-side infrastructure required to make this happen.   And the variety of ways that these companies implement their APIs makes field op data cards look standardized :(.   So, frankly, we'd been making this happen wth bubblegum and popsicle sticks and a lot of dedicated monitoring by our staff.   We've recently refactored this process into a single manageable, supportable, and distributable tool and have started selling it just this fall (AgDirector Service).

So... with the grower level business integration fully complete, and with our AgStudio Select and  AgDirector Service available as a bundle to be deployed on a third-party server, we will be ready to let customers start hosting their own database and accompanying services sometime in the first half of 2014.  We're working through it now with a couple of test accounts.   And we are studying if you will be able to host your own data but have the AgDirector Service hosted for you.   We'll announce the details of this program at our customer conference the first week in February.

About the Deere/DuPont integration:

• Pioneer is actively working with other companies on the same functionality.
• Deere is actively working with other companies on the same functionality.
• For those growers who already found value in having their data managed by their trusted Pioneer agency, this is a fantastic improvement over the use of sneaker-net for transferring the data.     It has nothing to do with data ownership/privacy relative to Pioneer (nothing that is different than using card data transfer).   A customer will need to review their Deere agreement as the data does flow through Deere to get to Pioneer.
• There was no press release on it, but of course we enabled this same feature for our other MapShots customers as well... both growers and service providers.

I'll be happy to answer any further technical questions or clarify policy.  Our contracts spell out the privacy and data/use policies and have no reason to debate them.  Each individual will have to determine if they do or do not trust the contracts or can agree with the policies.