I recommend doing this for anyone whose development platform of choice doesn't have an existing decent A/B testing option. You can do much, much better as a developer with something that has tight integration on the backend.
That said, Visual Website Optimizer / Optimizely are godsends for non-technical stakeholders like the marketing department at Random Insurance Company who want to be able to split test without getting into an argument over getting engineers assigned every single time. There's enough of a market there for both of them to do quite well indeed.
You hit the nail on the had. I think the much larger market is the non-technical user. Most "business people" (for lack of a better term) want access to lots of data to drive their key metrics. But being blocked on an engineering team to make and push changes to a website is a huge barrier to it ever happening.
A/B testing for marketers instead of engineers is a killer value to offer to a business.
That said, Visual Website Optimizer / Optimizely are godsends for non-technical stakeholders like the marketing department at Random Insurance Company who want to be able to split test without getting into an argument over getting engineers assigned every single time. There's enough of a market there for both of them to do quite well indeed.