Workday. The company offers a single cloud ERP system for finance, HR and planning, and says it is "helping enterprises around the world solve their biggest challenges".

Likewise, the company says that it knows the role of finance has changed.

It notes that "finance leaders now need to be able to communicate and collaborate in order to help other teams better understand the business, so they can operate more efficiently and feel empowered to make the right financial decisions on behalf of the company".

We're told that "finance leaders also need a real-time, data-driven approach to glean insights from the numbers in order to better inform decision making. They need to make better use of data analytics and need to get a better grasp on it, so they can feed data into AI capabilities and get smarter intelligence out of it."

We were offered an interview with Tim Wakeford, vice-president of Financials Product Strategy at Workday, to discuss the evolving role of the chief financial officer and the need to focus more on strategic value add activities, talent in the finance function and how technology is changing the goalposts, and more, with one of Wakeford's colleagues in Australia giving us an update on some of the company's Australian customers and their successes they're having, and you can see that interview in full below.

Workday is also hosting its 2018 Workday Rising conference in Las Vegas from 1 to 4 October, and the European version of its conference in Vienna from 13 to 15 November and Wakeford gave us a sneak peek of what to expect.

Here's the video interview, with a summary of the questions below the video.

I started by introducing Wakeford, who joined us over Zoom video conference in Singapore, and welcomed him to the program, which I noted was over Skype because that's what I normally use, and forgot that we used Zoom on this occasion!

I asked Wakeford to remind us of what Workday does and how it helps businesses with human resources, finance and human capital management, and a bit about his history and role at the company.

He explained how Workday sees the role of finance changing, the evolving role of the CFO and the need to focus more on strategic value add activities.

As noted above, we also spoke about talent in the finance function and how technology is changing the goalposts

I noted that I had done several interviews recently on AI, machine learning and big data, and asked what Workday is doing in this area.

We then switched over to one of Wakeford's colleagues, who told us about Workday's Australian customers and successes.

Wakeford then gave us a look a decade into the future, as I like to ask, and the business issues he thinks the industry and Workday may well be solving then.

He then shared the best piece of advice he had ever received to help him get where he is today, followed by his final message to iTWire viewers and readers, and to his current and future customers and partners.

Check out the video above for all the answers!