SOAP and Port Requests via Services and General Port Tests

From Services (i.e. external):

We need the ability to do SOAP requests (HTTP POST using XML payloads) and the ability to do a simple port request (i.e. to see if a service is listening). These are the two main things your product is missing at this time. Everyone else is doing it, so I'm not sure why this is missing.

From devices (i.e. internal from a machine that isn't a collector):

We need the ability to check a port on an arbitrary host. For example, I need to test a SQL port (1433) from WEB01 to test SQL01. Why can't I perform this basic function? I suppose I could make my WEB01 server a collector and check the device port from that collector, but that's adding complexity and potentially an auditing issue as the collector isn't in scope for my application.

Thanks!

Dennis