Q3 2024 SolarWinds Corp Earnings Call
Participants
Tim Karaca; Vice President of Finance; SolarWinds Corp
Sudhakar Ramakrishna; Director; SolarWinds Corp
Lewis Black; Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer; SolarWinds Corp
Rob Oliver; Analyst; Baird's
Matt Hedberg; Analyst; RBC capital markets
Sanjit Singh; Analyst; Morgan Stanley
Pinjalim Bora; Anlayst; JP Morgan
W. Miller Jump; Analyst; Truist Securities
Patrick Colville; Analyst; Scotia Bank
Presentation
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Chris and I will be your conference operator today. At this time. I would like to welcome everyone to Solarwinds third quarter, 2024 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw that question again, press star one. Thank you. I will now like to turn the conference over to Tim Karaca , Vice President of Finance. You may begin.
Tim Karaca
Thank you. Good morning, everyone and welcome to the Solar Winds third quarter, 2024 earnings call Sudhakar Ramakrishna, our President and CEO and Lewis Black. Our CFO are with me today following our prepared remarks. We'll have a question and answer session.
This call is being simultaneously webcast on our investor relations website at investors dot tolerance dotcom.
You can also find our press release and the summer slide deck which is intended to supplement our prepared remarks during today's call.
Please remember that certain statements made during this call are forward-looking statements including those concerning our financial outlook, our market opportunities, our expectations regarding customer retention, our continued evolution to subscription first mentality, our expectations regarding our partner ecosystem, the CC enforcement action, the impact of the global economic and geopolitical environment on our business and our gross level of debt.
These statements are based on currently available information and assumptions and we undertake no duty to update this information except as required by law.
These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties including the numerous risks and uncertainties highlighted in today's earnings release. And our filings with the SEC copies are available from the CC on our investor relations website.
We will discuss various non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. Almost other specified when we refer to financial measures. We'll be referring to non-GAAP financial measures.
A reconciliation of the differences between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures and the definition of other financial metrics discussed on today's call are available in our earnings press release and summary slide deck on the investor relations page of our website.
Finally, we note that the financial results discussed on today's call and in our earnings release are preliminary and pending final review by us and our external auditors and will only be final once we file our quarterly report on form. Thank you with that. I will now turn the call over to Sudhakar.
Sudhakar Ramakrishna
Thank you, Tim and good morning, everyone.
As always, I'd like to thank our employees, customers, partners and shareholders for their ongoing commitment to Sullivan.
I'm pleased to report that we delivered another strong quarter. Once again exceeding our guidance across our key metrics.
Our results testify to our team's commitment to customer success, the breadth and depth of our offerings and the trust that customers continue to place in us. I'm pleased with the execution of our teams which resulted in strong top line and adjusted ebita growth.
Now turning to the business highlights from this quarter. First, we again delivered strong subscription revenue and AR R growth highlighting the sustained momentum of our subscription first strategy.
Second, the increased adoption of our observability solution continues to drive revenue growth on October 2nd, we announced significant updates to this part of our portfolio more on this. In just a second.
Third, we continue to experience a good balance of deal sizes across our regions and market segments. We believe our low customer concentration and the criticality of our solutions to customer operations continue to underpin our performance. Fourth, we continue to extend our solutions portfolio with the goal of delivering the best time to value and time to detect and resolve issues for our customers.
I will now touch on some Q3 financial highlights before turning the call over to Lewis for more color on the quarter and our financial outlook for the balance of the year in Q3 2024 we delivered total revenue of 200 million representing 6% year over year growth above the high end of our guidance rate.
We continue to execute our subscription first strategy and delivered year over year subscription revenue growth of 30% and subscription ARR growth of 36% in the third quarter.
Our third quarter in quarter, maintenance renewal rate was 96% and our trailing 12 month maintenance renewal rate was 97% flat from 97% last quarter and up from 95% in Q3 of last year, our customer retention metrics remained robust. Highlighting the compelling value proposition of our solution total. ARR in the third quarter was $724 million. An increase of 8% year over year we delivered adjusted ebida of $96 million representing 13% year over year growth with 48% margin.
We continue to be a rule of 50 company turning to our product portfolio. As I've previously discussed, our purpose of enriching the lives of our customers is central to all we do reducing complexity, lowering costs and increasing our customers' productivity remain key motivating factors for our portfolio evolution.
I believe a diverse array of solutions across observability, database performance monitoring and service management. Deliver unmatched time to value time to detect and time to remediate issues.
We serve customers across on premises, cloud and hybrid environments, empowering them to make the best decisions for their organizations while adapting to their evolving needs.
Customers facing higher costs and complexities from multiple vendors continue to use our platform to consolidate their tools, lower their total cost of ownership and increase visibility across their hybrid environment.
We're encouraged by the traction here highlighted by key wins in Q3 with both public and private sector organizations turning to Sullivan's observability.
Most organizations have assets both on premises and in the cloud.
The complexity of these hybrid and distributed environments leads to visibility challenges resulting from a hybrid observability. GAAP.
This GAAP can cause degraded technology performance, prolonged issues, identification and resolution times and even damage customer experience from missed slas these can further cause declining customer satisfaction, lost business and reduced tech ROI impacting a company's bottom line and future growth. Of course, customers try to counter the hybrid observability GAAP with many tools leading to tools straw often they are forced to prioritize either on premises or cloud workloads due to the limitations of other software vendor solutions.
However, we designed our observability solution to close the hybrid observability GAAP and give our customers unified visibility across on premises and cloud environments.
It is gratifying to see growing validation in our approach. As organizations increasingly turn to our platform to consolidate their tools, lower TCO and increase visibility across their environment.
Earlier this month, we announced that our observability offerings are now collectively known as solar winds, observability a hybrid offering previously known as hybrid cloud observability and our cloud native SAS offering previously known as Sullivan's observability will now be known as Sullivan's observability self hosted and Sullivan's observability SAS respectively.
This change which we discussed at our Sullivan's Day on to the second is tightly aligned with how we market our comprehensive observability solutions to our end customers.
We continue to extend our versatile observability solutions in the market with key capabilities including improving system scalability to help customers reduce their footprint by as much as 50% thereby reducing their total cost of ownership.
Expanded support for Azure and Aws workloads, Svan extensions, wireless access points and storage arrays. We believe these enhancements further improve our competitiveness in landing new customers as we help customers more readily eliminate tools from.
We evolved our AI ops progress around anomaly based alerts to reduce alert fatigue and to improve incident management.
These enhancements can help customers reduce their time to detect and time to resolve issues.
Our observability database performance and service management solutions work together to deliver a great value to our customers. We are excited by the energy of our team, bringing and sharing these improvements with our customers and we are confident in the solutions we offer to the visibility problems. Our customers have told they face turning to Solomon service management. We are leveraging generative AI to extend our capabilities, allowing customers to auto generate runbooks further accelerating remediation capabilities and time savings.
We also continued our expansion journey with our enterprise service management platform enabling our customers to provide help desk solutions across any department in the organization.
So even its customers who enabled our gen A I features have achieved meaningful year over year improvement. In the meantime, to resolve issues, we are seeing greater adoption of these gen A I capabilities which are part of our service desk solutions premium package and result in higher average sales prices.
Now turning to our database performance management solution, we continue to simplify the packaging and pricing of our database solutions.
Now customers have the freedom and flexibility to choose the right solution for their environment.
Analogous to the changes we implemented for our observability solutions over the last two plus years, we believe this will further simplify the customer experience resulting in greater adoption and higher ASP.
As always, we remain dedicated to helping customers reduce costs while enabling them to accelerate their business transformation.
We believe this will give us further opportunity to expand our footprint in customers' environments and help them consolidate their tools in closing. I'm proud of the progress we have made against the priorities we provided at the start of the year.
First, we are extending our soliance platform and delivering effective solutions built to help customers achieve hybrid visibility and manage their hybrid and multi cloud environments.
The recent announcements on Sullivan's observability represent significant milestone achievements against this priority.
Second, investing selectively while continuing to exercise expense discipline and seeking expanded profitability as evidenced by portfolio evolution, topline growth and bottom line profitability.
Third, focusing on subscription and total ARR growth, customer success and retention, growing profitability and creating more value for our shareholders.
We aim to continue to deliver compelling value to our customers. The relevance of our solutions and the commitment of our team gives me high confidence in our ability to deliver a strong Q4. With that, I will now turn it over to Lewis to expand on our financial performance and provide our fourth quarter a full year 2024 outlook Lewis.
Lewis Black
Thank you, Sudhakar. I'm thrilled to be here with all of you today. On my first solar winds earnings call, we delivered a strong third quarter and continued the momentum we built in the first half of the year like Saker, I am confident in our ability to achieve our business and financial goals in the remainder of 2024.
Although the it spending environment continues to be challenging. We continue to see growth in the mix of predictable recurring revenue and have delivered sustained ARR growth.
I'll now turn to the numbers.
We finished the third quarter with a total revenue of 200 million. A 6% increase compared to the prior year and above the high end of the outlook for total revenue of 196 million that we provided. Last quarter, we ended the third quarter with total ARR of 724 million up 8% year over year.
Our subscription ARR at the end of the third quarter was 289 million. An increase of 36% year over year. This growth continues to be driven by the execution of our subscription first strategy.
We had 1100 customers with over $100,000 of total AR R representing 18% growth over the prior year.
Digging into the revenue details. Our third quarter subscription revenue was 76 million up 30% year over year. The increase in subscription revenue continues to reflect the success of our subscription first strategy which includes converting a portion of our maintenance base to our subscription products.
Maintenance revenue was 111 million in the third quarter. Down 5% compared to the prior year. This decline was expected as we continue to convert existing customers to our solarwinds observability products.
Our maintenance renewal rate is 97% on a trailing 12 month basis and was 96% for the third quarter. To remind you as we convert maintenance customers to subscriptions. We exclude those customers from this renewal rate calculations due to the subscription revenue growth and strong maintenance renewal rates. 94% of our total revenue is now recurring revenue for the third quarter. License revenue was 13 million down 10% from 14 million in the third quarter of 2023 as a reminder, our subscription first focus has affected and will continue to affect our licensed sales performance.
Our focus on operating discipline continues to drive results and we delivered another strong quarter of nongaap profitability. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA was 96 million growing 13% year over year representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 48% and coming in 3 million above the high end of the 93 million outlook we gave for the quarter turning to our balance sheet, our net leverage ratio at September 30th was approximately 2.8 times. Our trailing 12 month adjusted EBIDA compared to three times at the end of last quarter.
As always, we will monitor the interest rate environment and look for opportunities to further reduce our variable interest rate in the future.
We generated 115.5 million in cash flow from operations in the nine months ended September 30th, our cash and cash equivalents and short term investment balance at quarter end was 199.2 million.
Our nongaap diluted earnings per share were 27¢ which was above the guidance range of 24 to 26¢. This beat was largely due to our improved profitability.
I will now walk you through our outlook before turning it over to stacker for final thoughts.
I will start with our fourth quarter guidance and then discuss our updated outlook for the year for the fourth quarter. We expect total revenue to be in the range of 201 million to 204 million representing 2% growth at the midpoint adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter is expected to be approximately 95 to 98 million representing 11% growth at the midpoint.
Nongaap fully diluted earnings per share are projected to be 27 to 28¢ per share assuming an estimated 175 million fully diluted shares outstanding.
Finally, our outlook for the fourth quarter assumes a Nongaap tax rate of 26% and we expect to pay approximately 9 million in cash taxes during the fourth quarter for the full year. We are pleased to raise the revenue guidance and expect total revenue to be in the range of 788 million to 791 million representing 4% year over year growth at the midpoint.
We are raising our adjusted EBITDA for the year which is now expected to be approximately 376 million to 379 million representing 15% year over year growth at the midpoint.
Non-Gaap diluted earnings per share are projected to be $1.08 to $1.09 per share assuming an estimated 173.9 million fully diluted shares outstanding.
Our full year and fourth quarter guidance assumes a EUR to dollar exchange rate of $1 and the 6 Cense to 1 EUR with that, I'll return the call to Sudhakar for his closing remarks.
Sudhakar Ramakrishna
Thank you, Lewis. I'm pleased with our progress in the third quarter, evidenced by our strong financial performance and the platform updates that address our customers' evolving and critical needs.
We delivered a strong Q3 and I'm confident about closing Q4 and 2024 on a high note as we continue to execute our strategy, which we set more than three years ago.
As I look to the future, I remain optimistic for several reasons. First, we continue to serve a large growing and diversified customer base with a broad array of solutions allowing us to increase our share of wallet while growing our relevance, we believe the growth in our ARR and strong customer retention proves this out.
Second, our solar winds platform continues to mature, enhancing our ability to add functionality at a lower marginal R&D cost. This was always the premise of building a platform and it is beginning to bear fruit.
Third, our strong customer and partner base, fantastic customer success teams, events like the recent Sullivan's Day on October 2nd and the Tracks community are great sources for understanding emerging trends and evolving customer needs. We believe this increases our ability to deliver customer relevant solutions and de risk our portfolio development efforts. Fourth, our good market efforts continue to grow from a strong heritage of inside sales with a broader and more committed partner ecosystem. Planning distributors, resellers, managed service providers and cloud service providers.
These partners broaden our reach in a cost-effective way.
Finally, and most importantly, I'm proud of our team for remaining steadfast in the purpose of enriching the lives of our customers.
I believe we are best positioned to help customers reduce the complexity of their hybrid environments, improve visibility, increase productivity and reduce their costs. Again, I want to thank our employees, partners, customers and shareholders for their continued commitment to Furance Lewis and I are now happy to address your questions.
Question and Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. And if you'd like to withdraw that question again, press star one, we also ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow up. Your first question comes from the line of Rob Oliver with Baird. Please go ahead.
Rob Oliver
Great. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Saker, we had the opportunity to attend your product roll out earlier in Tober and you know, very impressive and you guys have made a ton of progress across all of your different product areas, particularly around cloud enhancements. I'd be curious and I know it's still early with the new functionality. But when you look at the different areas, whether it be hypercloud, observability or database observability, where you're seeing kind of the most signs of traction right now, if there's any one area to call out or also maybe what you're hearing from some of the increased activity with your partners around where they're seeing the most pull from these products and activity in their pipeline. And then I had a quick follow up for Lewis as well.
Lewis Black
Sounds good, Rob. Good morning. And thank you again for your ongoing support of the approach that we have taken with the Sullivans platform. And the integrated solutions is to be able to intersect a customer in their journey and be able to help them evolve it. And that could start from a customer who is on on premises with some assets in the cloud or a customer that might be committed fully to the cloud. So it really doesn't matter to us in terms of how we have architected our solutions. It's all about providing them flexibility. Now, to your point about where do we see the pull. If instead of looking at it as a particular functionality, we should be looking at the broader context of the customer and most customers are looking at, how do I bridge the on premises and cloud divide, so to speak. Today, they use a number of tools to address it. And with our solutions, they're able to not only get hybrid visibility but also consolidate vendor tools. That's one reason why I would suggest you're seeing a continuing increase in 100 K plus AR R customers. And so it really depends on the customer, but with the platform flexibility that we have, we are able to address and intersect very, very quickly.
Rob Oliver
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. And then Louis just, you know, a bit of an open ended question from you, but now that you've been you know, in your seat now for a little bit over a quarter, just wanted to get a sense from you of kind of your, your thoughts. You know, obviously very powerful financial model, you know, it solar winds and highly profitable. I think, you know, what we hear often from investors is, you know what, when a lot of a lot of positive changes here, one good top line growth pick up you certainly not asking you to guide to 25. But when you look at the model and some of what you've seen now here being in your seat over a quarter, perhaps some observations on some of your goals are priorities in the seat. Thank you very.
Much.
Okay, sure. I.
Lewis Black
Thank, thank you for the question. So first thing is that the reason that I joined the company when I saw an effective market, and that the company had a great strategy, it was aligned to the market and the customer needs. And the, the business had an incredible customer base to continue to develop grow and deliver value for. So all of these beliefs coming into the company, All I've done is I've, I've further kind of validated the assumptions that I had in coming into the company in terms of the business model, the business model is very powerful. I think the strategy is clearly aligned to both where the market is going and the needs of the customer. So I see it as long term and sustaining. We're early days in terms of the transformation journey and we still have a long way to go. But the the thesis of developing a platform expanding and broadening the capabilities of that and then leveraging the installed base to deliver continued future value to the customers. It is a long term sustained play, a lot of value will continue to be delivered. And I'm I'm very excited about the Opportunity ahead.
Sudhakar Ramakrishna
Rob. Lewis won't mention this, but in addition to significant financial capabilities and background, he also brings a significant operational expertise to the table that will allow us to H1 in on specific and targeted investments more efficiently than we were able to do before. And our journey of profitable growth will continue. As you know, we just reported 8% ARR growth and 94% of our business is now recurring. So that gives us a super solid foundation to continue our journey. But we are also very prudent about how to think about the future.
Rob Oliver
Understood.
Thanks very much.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg with RBC capital markets. Please go ahead.
Matt Hedberg
Thanks for picking my questions. Gentlemen and congrats on the, on the results. It's really good to see the momentum. I guess the doctor, you know, your, your growth rate continues to kind of tick up here this year and, and, and the beats are getting larger and relative to what we saw earlier this year. I'm just curious, you know, is could you could you put a finer point on on the demand environment? I know you said it was sort of stable, but you know, the results are certainly, you know, feel better than stable. So just kind of curious if you could help us understand you know, some of the demand trends that you're seeing.
Lewis Black
Definitely ma first of all, thanks again for your ongoing support of of sole.
I am very pleased with the results that we delivered and it is simply an indication of ongoing progress and validation of our strategy and execution abilities with regards to the demand environment. As you know, we have a very large and diversified customer base both by GEO as well as market segment. A lot of our expansion or growth definitely comes from our installed base as we support them with broader solutions, more ability to consolidate their platforms, simplify their co or reduce their cost, I should say and increase their productivity. A lot of our demand comes from that. But we also have been getting our fair share of new customers as well in terms of the trends in the demand itself, I would say that and as they've consistently been reporting, we haven't seen like huge variations up or down in demand. And given the macro uncertainty, we continue to be prudent about future quarters and years.
Matt Hedberg
Got it. Thanks. And then once the Lewis congrats on, on the, on the, on the role again, and I guess a little bit of a fall to the last question. You know, I, I guess I'm sort of curious about, you know, your, your guidance philosophy. You know, you know, I don't know how trends were in October, I assume they're continued to be stable. But I'm just curious, like, you know, you know, how do you think about like the prospects of a four Q budget flush embedded in the guidance and just, just maybe a little bit more on sort of your approach to building out a forecast?
Lewis Black
So a number of factors play into that one is how the business is performing today. Secondly, is what we can see in terms of the market playing out, going forward and what are the things that we can validate? We try and get as much information from the market and the external sources to see what other companies are seeing as well. And then we apply a combination of how the business is performing and apply that to what we're seeing in the market, determine what we believe an appropriate forecast and guide is. And that will of course, be tempered with a level of prudence to make sure that what we can deliver, we are able to, or to make sure that, that what we state we have confidence that we will be able to deliver. So I believe it's fairly consistent with the approach that has been applied historically. I think it has been a solid approach and I know that the company has had a great record of being able to deliver the guidance that has been given historically and our goal. And my expectation is that we will continue that.
Matt Hedberg
Thanks a lot. Best.
Lewis Black
Of luck for the remainder of the year.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Sanjit Singh
Yes. Thank you for taking the questions and congrats on the, on the solid Q3 results. You know, in addition to on boarding Lewis as the new Chief Financial Officer and, and congrats lew on the role, You also brought on a new Chief Revenue Officer Zach, I was wondering if you could just give us some insight into the particular capabilities of, of this executive coming on board and if you give us a sense of the magnitude of change that we should expect for the sales force, obviously, we're coming up on a Q4, but then going to 2025 what is he going to be his you know, priorities and objectives going into next year?
Lewis Black
Thank you again, Sanjit, good to hear from you. Andre has joined our company and has jumped right in in terms of major strategic shifts in go to market. I would not suggest that there will be any in the sense that a lot of the foundations that we have laid out. And I'll remind everyone that our foundations of a very robust inside sales motion will continue. That is something that the rest of the market has tried to emulate and that is the, in my opinion, one of the most scalable go to market models you can build. At the same time, we saw opportunities working with partners working with global system integrators, cloud service providers to expand our market reach.
Andre comes in with significant experience in those areas, be it with the partner ecosystem and the global system integrated space. So what I'm hoping and expecting as we get into 2025 and beyond is that Andre will bring his vast skills and extend our current your market models into those, but we'll always be very careful with how we deploy your market resources and ensure that our expense to bookings ratios are consistent with our financial goals.
Sanjit Singh
Understood that that was very clear as a follow up, I had a question on gen I and gen E I has to relate to the pricing strategy sort of going forward. And so it's sort of a two quarter. So you mentioned in your script about enterprise service management as customers take on more of those gen A I capabilities in service management. What sort of uplift are you seeing relative to your, your your standard offering? And then more broadly as the observability push gets more mature and enterprise service management gets more mature. How are you thinking about pricing? There's definitely a sort of debate on fee based models versus more utility consumption based models. Should we anticipate that those more consumptive type pricing models start to layer in within service now? Sorry, I'm sorry, within solar winds over time.
Lewis Black
Sanjit, the consumptive models and consumption based pricing models are things that we continue to contemplate but not something that you should model or we have modeled at this point in time. With regards to gen A I and the monetization of it. As I noted in my script, we have extended our enterprise service management and gen capabilities, especially things like automated runbooks, et cetera are part of our premium package. And the idea there is that customers should see compelling value there. And as they buy more of that, we get an automatic ASP upload. So it's not something where we charge for gen A I as much as gen A I is a capability of significant product enhancements and of course value delivery to customers. And that'll be the approach that we will take and the ASP applift. We, we'll keep referring to how we are progressing there. But the early indicators on enterprise service management is there's a lot more leaning towards the premium package, which is a way for us to monetize the AI.
Sanjit Singh
Great to hear the doctor.
Thank you very much.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Pinjalim Bora with a JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Pinjalim Bora
Oh, great. Thank you so much. So just one question for you, seems like a nice bump in the 100-k customers sequentially maybe talk about the driver. Seems like you said consolidation. Is that the main driver? Is there? Is there that up skewing into kind of premium skews? Is that also happening or more adoption across the three product pillars? Maybe just double click into that. Thank you very much.
Lewis Black
Absolutely. The first driver I would highlight is the ongoing conversion to subscription. As we have converted our maintenance base to subscription. There's always an opportunity to discuss the value with the customer. And as you remember, I have noted that our subscription transition is not simply a business model transition as much as it is a value model transition. So in many of those con conversations, we consolidate customers tools so that in essence means that we are getting a larger share of wallet. That is definitely one aspect of it. The second increasingly is the fact that we have a more unified observability solution that spans on premises and cloud and closes the hybrid visibility. GAAP is enabling us to win larger deals. That's an early trend, but it's definitely a contributing trend. And the third piece is what you mentioned, which is some of the upstream customer requirements, especially as we selectively go upstream into the enterprise through G SI partners. That's also a contributing factor.
Pinjalim Bora
Understood. Thank you.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Miller jump with truest securities. Please go ahead.
W. Miller Jump
Thank you for taking the question and I will echo my congrats on the solid execution. I, I actually, I I also wanted to double click on some of the consolidation theme that has come up a couple times on the call. Just wondering if you could give a little more color on these deals. It is a motion where you know, your sales team is proactively reaching out and driving this consolidation are customers really coming to you kind of renewal cycles and then maybe just is there any difference between that sales cycle versus your traditional one?
Lewis Black
Definitely the renewal cycle is a instigator for a broader conversation. But we are not restricted only to a renewal cycle and it is in the spirit of continuous touch. As we have been discussing as part of our good market evolution over the last three years. I while we had a very strong transactional motion, historically, what we have done is evolve that transactional motion to more of a continuous touch motion. We have an incredibly strong customer success team that is regularly in touch with customers understanding, doing pulse checks, figuring out their ongoing needs. And I spoke about the community effect as well. So there is both a push and a pull here.
W. Miller Jump
Thanks for that and, and then maybe for lew, I know you're not guiding, you know, 25 but just curious if you could talk at a high level about the key drivers you're thinking about in the model for next year, given ongoing transformation in particular interested. If you see any catalyst for acceleration of the transition.
Lewis Black
I think it's, as I, as I said earlier, it's a long term model that we are building into. So from a priority standpoint, we'll continue to extend the Solarwinds platform. We'll also, we'll, we'll invest selectively around potential growth.
W. Miller Jump
Opportunities while continuing.
Lewis Black
To, to exercise expense discipline. And we'll, we'll focus on the subscription arr customer success and continuing to grow profitability. So these are all the areas that we will be focusing on going into next year. And although we're not going to give guidance, we will give guidance for the or during the Q4 call for next year. I think if you're as you think about modeling for, for 2025 you should look to the implied a Q4 exit growth rate, which I think is a good kind of baseline and proxy for how you should be Thinking about next year.
W. Miller Jump
Very helpful. Thank you.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Colville with Scotia Bank. Please go ahead.
Patrick Colville
Hey morning, Saka Lewis, you know, thank you for having me on the call and it's a real pleasure to be part of the story.
I guess I, I want to ask about ebida margin. You know, in Q3 ebida margin, they hit a record high, which is, you know, undoubtedly very impressive to see.
But when in our launch, you know, one of the questions we received kind of quite frequently from investors was how solar wind is thinking about balancing margin versus the investments in, go to market and product development, given the market opportunity you highlighted. So do you mind just talking to that? I guess, kind of qualitatively of how you think about that kind of balance between profitability and investment on a go forward basis?
Lewis Black
Sure, I'll take, I'll.
Take that anger. So I clearly we, we have a policy and a strategy to, to balance growth and profitability and we will continue to do that. So we're, we're always looking to consider opportunities to drive more growth. And we will continue to do that where we see there's a clear return coming back on the investments that we're we're making. But we're also highly focused on profitability. Profitability continues to be an important factor for us. So we are going to balance the, the growth investments as well as the, the opportunity to continue to streamline and simplify and make our business more efficient.
Patrick Colville
Okay. Understood. And then in terms of the, the, the the product name changes, I mean, I think that makes a ton of sense to us to kind of simplify the, the thela. I guess I want to ask about Solarwind SAS. You know, how is that progressing in terms of adoption? And are there any quantitative metrics you'd be willing to provide in order to allow us to understand, you know, adoption of Solarwind Sass as of three Q.
Lewis Black
Patrick, I'll, I'll touch on it and Louis might want to elaborate. We do not break out into s and other types of consumption.
The primary reason on the observability side is, as we noted on our October 2nd announcements. We have looked at on premises to cloud, be it self hosted or fast consumed as a continuum. There are lots of customers where they have both our solutions and we are helping them actively bridge those as well. So it kind of becomes difficult to split those out. What I can say qualitatively is that we continue to make strong progress in that dimension. And my expectation is that the continued progression will be a function of where the customers are in their journey and how they plan to evolve it.
Patrick Colville
Wonderful. Thank. Thank you so much.
Operator
And that does conclude our question and answer session and I will now turn the conference back over to Suica for closing comments.
Sudhakar Ramakrishna
Thank you again and I appreciate everyone's attendance today and the questions so we will keep you posted on our progress.
Operator
And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.